Last week I finished the prototypes for the REV 5 Pinheck Board and shipped them to Spooky Pinball. I built 5 boards for testing to make sure this is the final revision before starting the full on production run. These will be in the machines Spooky is taking to the Midwest Gaming Classic. I will also be there encase anyone has questions about the board set.

Second prototype board I finished.

Test jigs to make sure the boards are made correctly. I am working on a better test jig for the production run that will be fully automated to help speed up the testing process.

These are the first 5 test boards to make sure the changes from the REV4 board we done correctly. Since I am pretty sure this is the final revision I ordered the boards on FR4 170TG and ENIG finish. 170TG is higher temperature rated substrate which allows for lead free reflow without scotching the board. ENIG finish is a higher quality finish for the pads over HASL as it tends to be flatter and more consistent which is nicer on the pick and place machines.

Pinheck board on the pick and place. Currently the machine is only setup to place the passive parts which are the resistors, capacitors, and LEDs. This consists almost 90% of the board parts.

After the pick and place I manually placed the IC chips and placed it on the intake side of our reflow oven.

This is what the board looks like after coming out of the reflow. There are a couple bridges on the ICs so I will need to tweak my automatic paste dispenser settings.

Finished soldering the through hole parts. Wishing I had a selective soldering machine about now!

Just finished testing the REV 4 prototype. Flashed the Propeller and PIC32 successfully multiple times. Test software verifies that the hardware is working. I pushed the last fixes to GitHub that will make up the REV 5 board. Looking at selling the boards around the $400 mark fully assembled and ready to go with sample code.

This is the board I have been working on for Ben Heckendorn for his America’s Most Haunted pinball game. This is Revision 4. Will be finished soldering it tomorrow. Most of the passives are done as long with the ICs. Just the 0.1uF caps, mosfets, and connectors are left.

Just finished cleaning and soldering the first board for Tommy. I managed to get the connectors that did not fit on by sanding a bit of the plastic off. The footprints where off by 0.5mm.

The only thing I am waiting for now is my PC power supply (I knew I shouldn’t have tossed those when I moved…) to test the hardware. When that is done the board is heading over to one of my friends so he can program the ASM drivers that will run the system.

After that I will order Revision 1 which has currently all the corrections to the footprints and spacing issues. Once that version is verified I will release all the design docs to open source the project. I could do so now but I would hate if someone ordered the board and it didn’t work.

Been hard at work soldering up the first revision of the pcb. Found some spacing issues between connectors and parts but so far all the hardware works. The PC power supply port was mirrored….dunno how that happened but it works…just on the wrong side of the board.

The 74HC595s need to be soldered on and I am still waiting on the WS2803 chips for the lighting portion.